January Wisdom

January Wisdom

To be fat and fallow

to increase in the decreasing hours of light with

the last sideways glance from summer’s face long gone,

to place around the darkened heart a vast expanse of stillness

and repose where even the molecules slow their spanish dance

in time to the slackening cadence of the dwindling days

while the barren soughing of the desert wind 

teases away fullness and steals its seed

and the floating grey plate of clouds covers a dish of storms

soon to be served up cold and white; to know

small sapient beings in their dens beneath the sand

nonetheless grow fat in husbanded specks and grains

gleaned when the light was consuming the flowers with harmony;

to know that even a builder of flowers should find as much

in the stark empty stalks waving in the frozen light

as in the wild rioting colors and replications of their prime,

as much in the dead fruit of the arrow after the shaft has struck

as in the grace and strength of its arc, the cunning of the bow;

that wide black immensity should speak not of its swallowing,

but of what will eventually emerge;

all this is January wisdom.

January, 1992

Revised January, 2010

Posted for Saturday New Year's Celebration at the inimitable One Stop Poetry

Photo : Oklahoma winter grass, 
© joy ann jones